Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

Having grown up on that keyboard, I can say that I sincerely hope so. Adieu!

I hope the replacement will be programmer-friendly. I still remap my French keyboards in QWERTY because I never got accustomed to hunt for programming characters on AZERTY keyboards.

I don't know how useful it would be to get programmers and IT pros on-board, in order to help adoption.

> The culture ministry has commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer.

Yeah, as usual some minister gave money to business owned by a friend or family member for useless study. A french classic. And of course, impossible to know how much this study cost the tax payers ... I don't believe this kind of matter should be a priority of the culture ministry.

It isn't so hard to establish. Colemak and its variants are clearly among the most efficient out there, and there are plenty of metrics one can use to judge, such as finger travel distance, alternating distribution of right and left hand use, and concentration of the most commonly used characters on the home row.

The problem is mainly that it isn't default, which can make it annoying unless you don't mind buying native colemak keyboards.

Changing your caps lock key to a backspace provides most of the finger travel benefits of colemak with much less annoyance.

You can be bi-keyboardial. On my home computer I use a modified version of swedish dvorak (svdvorak). I thought that since svdvorak isn't available anywhere I might as well go full obscure.

I type almost as fast with qwerty, but vastly prefer not having to move my fingers that much.

On a separate note: you don't have to be that smart to modify dvorak to something better. Just switching u and i and d and h brings a lot.